The secret of your company’s value

The secret of your company’s value is very simple: Brand Consistency. And you have the power to boost it.

What’s Brand Consistency?

First of all, your brand is who you are. It’s what’s makes you unique. And it’s what makes you stand out from the competitors. This is why is so important.

Brand Consistency means that all your messages and marketing materials follow the same graphic style. It doesn’t mean that your brand has to be boring at all, but it means that your brand has a visual cohesion.

Benefits of Brand Consistency

One of them, as I mentioned, is that increase customer recognition. Over time, your target will identify your brand even when they only see a part of it. For example, your colour scheme, your tagline or your symbol. For example, when you hear “I’m loving it”, you know it’s McDonals. Or when you see the Nike symbol, you know that is Nike but you are not reading the company’s name in either case.

Another one is that it reinforces your identity. When your target sees your brand message they know what to expect and they trust in your business.

Besides, you transmit trust and confidence because your are not changing your messages or your colour scheme one day and another, you are confident with your brand and you stick with it, and this is what your target will see from you.

The most important question: How to keep it?

Have a Brand Style Guide: This guide contains everything related to your brand, typography, colour scheme, photography style, marketing messages.
Also it is called Corporate Manual.

It’s important that all your employees have access to this manual because they have to follow this guidelines. If they don’t know what to do, they might commit mistakes when they pick up the phone, write a tweet or when they make any kind of communication with your target.

Most people think that only big companies must have a style guide but it’s not true, small companies and also self-employees need it too. I’m a freelancer and I have my own Style Guide. Even if you are a self-employee or only two workers it’s very useful because it’s save you time. Every time you have to write an email or publish a photo on Twitter you can go to the Style Guide and follow the instructions and you wil get it!

Message: You need to define your core message.

How will you introduce your company to others? In a networking event? In a forum?

Which is your elevator pitch?

This is a must also, you need to define your main message and repeat it every time you have to, because if one day you introduce your company as a tech company and another day you introduce it as a videogame company you’re confusing people, it’s not the same. So people won’t trust you.

Tone: Will you speak and write in an informal or formal style?

Which kind of words will you use?

This is also important and you have to be careful specially on social media because here we tend to forget to write well.

Design: Use your logo and design elements properly. It’s horrible when you see pixeled logos, or logos with a different colour or even stretched them out of proportion. Don’t make this kind of mistakes.

To maintain this,and this is useful for the Style Guide as well. I advice you to have a shared folder with all your employees. This folder can be online, for example Dropbox or Google Drive are perfect!. Or you can also have it on your ftp if you use one.

Another good practice is to have templates for your social media photos or compositions, this will save you a lot of time.

Channels: Which social network will you use?

You don’t need to have all of them, just only the ones where your target is.

Will you use the phone or email to talk with your customers? Or both?
Which frequency will you use to publish new content?

It’s important to answer this question carefully and follow it.

Dont be overwhelmed. Regarding social media, with 2 or 3 is enough, at least to start.